SixFold
by Dragongirl of the Stars
Summary: It wasn't a garbage bin, and the world's not exactly as it seems. The Doctor crosses dimensions, and two girls dive deep into his chaos. DISCONTINUED.
1. Prologue

_"Are you ready, love?"_

_I shift my position on the wide bed, making myself as comfortable as possible. It is odd to me, still, that I no longer feel the greedy fingers of fatigue on my body. Not now, and probably not ever. "Yes," I say._

_"Sure?"_

_"I'm as ready as I can be."_

_It is enough confirmation for him. He nods at me and turns to his page, dipping a long feathered quill into a bottle of ink. I watch as he writes today's date at the corner of the page in his perfect, almost spidery handwriting. _14 August 1796_._

_He stops then, quill poised, and flashes me a warm smile. My signal to begin. I open my mouth to speak._

_"17 November, 2008..."_

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I can't believe I'm posting this now..._ Muse, you kill me...  
_


	2. Day

**Chapter One: Day **

People on the road were staring now. Our hysterical laughter echoed up the street, probably disturbing birds and lizards and rabbits down by the valley reservoir.

"Can you _imagine_ –" a peal of giggles punctuated Sam's sentence – "having to _wear_ that thing to school?"

"Getting that thing _to_ school would be a trick by itself," I added, striving to control myself. It didn't work.

Our hysteric amusement went on, even as we reached the gate of Sam's complex. Perhaps it had been the strangely intense afternoon heat that had influenced our craziness, or maybe it was just our way of letting loose after six hours of sophomore schooling. Neither of us were currently sane enough to tell. Or care.

November in Orange County was a time of year in which students' attitudes were stuck in a state of flux: on the one hand, we were entering the middle of the school year. On the other, Christmas was coming, and Christmas meant winter break. For me, the break meant two weeks of Sam's constant company; but it also meant cold weather. I hated cold, and with a passion.

There's a good reason for that, of course, and it's one Sam was well aware of. However, she was also the _only_ one aware of it, besides myself, and I intended to keep it that way. It was our little secret. Okay, it was a big secret, but you could say it was just bigger on the inside – it all depended on how you looked at it.

Firstly, I was an orphan. No parents to speak of, not even a birth certificate. I had literally been found as a baby in a basket on the doorstep of an orphanage, nothing to my name except a necklace and, well, my name -- on a card labelled _Christina Shipht_.

But that wasn't the secret. There was more to it than that.

More than I would ever imagine.

* * *

_Yeah it's short. I can't help splitting it. _

_The rest will come when the Muse deigns appropriate. _X-X


	3. Other

**I just hope this doesn't bore you. This chap and the next are relatively long and nothing but background. But they're necessary. And as soon as they're done I'm throwing you right into the action.**

**Disclaimer: Who in their right mind would write fanfiction for something they **_**owned**_**?**

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**Chapter Two: Other**

I wasn't normal.

I'd known it as far back as I could remember. That didn't necessarily mean I had always known exactly how I was different – just that I knew I was. The truth had simply occurred to me one day.

It was at a very young age – around four or five – that the epiphany hit: not everyone could do what I could. I had wandered into the living room to catch a glimpse of a news report my foster mother had been watching; a man had died in a car crash. Innocently I had asked my foster mother why the man hadn't just flown away before he crashed, out the window. She'd given me a confused, almost indignant face and said, "People can't just fly away. Why do you ask that?"

But something had gone off in the kitchen and she left before I could reply; the event was promptly forgotten by all but me.

Her statement had confused me. "Flying away" was something I had achieved on numerous occasions, with hardly any effort – right along with sneaking around the tiny garden on our front porch and climbing the fence out back. I had recalled the expression on my foster mother's face, and I found myself wondering if she would make that face at _me_ if she were to know that I could "just fly away."

This concept set in, and I became filled with nervous fear. I soon realised that I didn't _want_ her to know what I could do. I didn't want _anyone_ to know. It became my secret.

That was when I began to close up. My fear of discovery had affected my social behaviour – unconsciously I isolated myself from other people. I talked very little and became less and less interested in having friends or playing outside. I developed no attachment to anyone or anything, except the birds outside and the necklace that was ever-present around my neck. Not even for my foster parents – not _any_ of my foster parents.

The only thing that seemed to have remained unaffected was my appetite. I never gained an ounce, yet I was always hungry or eating. And cold. I was constantly cold – and I _hated_ being cold. Several times my foster parents tried to fatten me up a bit by giving me meat – they were strictly vegetarian, and I'd been eating their food since I was old enough to consume it – but it always, always made me sick. Any meat I ate took three minutes flat to come right back up. A vegetarian without a choice, I remained stringy-limbed and short.

By my seventh birthday it seemed my foster parents had decided that I was not simply going through a "phase." But instead of pursuing any form of possible treatment – say, therapy – I was handed away. Everyone seemed to have reached the conclusion that my foster parents' environment, the edge of the city, was simply not conducive to raising an orphaned child. But by then I didn't care. I'd become too comfortable with living inside myself; my home was mobile. It didn't matter where they put me, because I would always have my shelter. They couldn't take me away from myself. That fact was one of the few constants in what would become a constantly inconstant life: I would move from place to place, but the routine would always be the same.

And because I had raised myself with the notion that my safety came from physical and mental isolation, I became labelled a Lost Cause. Not even the therapists, later hired by my second foster parents, could crack my case. To everyone I was simply stoic and empty – not empty-headed, but devoid of emotion. My grades proved that I was intelligent, but my teachers' comments proved I was not "socially adept." Well, my kindergarten teacher said "shy." My first and second grade teachers were just a little closer to conceiving the truth. But not by much.

They were all wrong, for the most part. I did have emotions. I was simply _adept_ at hiding them. But I wasn't about to prove that to anyone anytime soon.

Later on, however, when I was around eight, I discovered there was one emotion I had very little control over. At that age, I was still short and nothing but bony limbs, a wicked-sharp nose, green eyes and a frightening mass of dark red hair. It happened at the playground.

I had been examining a flower from the school landscaping during lunch. A sudden shout had drawn my attention – some chunk of a kid had pushed a little girl off the swings and she had begun to cry. Physically overwhelmed by the girl's pain and heartbreak, I became angry. I dropped my flower, stood, crossed the playground, and walked straight up to the large ten-year-old boy. My advance had caught his notice and he turned – and just in time to watch my scrawny fist come flying at his chubby face. I didn't hit him hard enough to break his nose, but certainly hard enough to make him cry.

I did not recall there ever being a bully at Chesterfield Elementary after that.

Perhaps karma got back at me the following year, for hitting him – violence was not the answer, as they constantly reminded us. My foster father had been taking me to school one rainy morning. Typical of southern California, there were always at least six car accidents every time it rained. We happened to be the first one that day.

Someone had run the stoplight. It happened too fast for either of us to react, and before we could fully comprehend what was happening the SUV had crunched against the hood of our car, jerking us forward. A second car swerved to miss us – we had ended up the middle of the intersection – but had lost control on the still-wet road and fishtailed directly into our hood.

The windscreen had collapsed as the second car crushed us with its back end. We had been jerked forward again, and despite my seatbelt, the force of the crash had sent me face first into the dashboard, directly into a shard of broken windshield.

My right eye had been damaged beyond repair, they later told me, when I had been taken to Intensive Care. It would have to be removed, they had said. Removed and replaced.

They gave me a glass eye. They were going to give me a green, but I had shaken my head no. None of the green matched my dark irises. I chose blue, thinking that if they weren't going to match, then the difference might as well be obvious. One eye was always open a little wider than the other, after that.

As if I hadn't already had enough trauma. Not that I had shown any fear, of course. That would have gone against the grain of my now reinforced creed; the crash had brought back the memory of what had originally influenced my opinion of the world, almost half a decade before. I hadn't "flown away," had I? No.

It wasn't until another year later that I finally put a name to my ability.

I'd gone to the library. One of my books had been due, and the idea came to me as I passed the computers. Despite the still-relatively-slow Internet of 2002, my research was brief; the answer was synonymous. That day became a climax in my life. I now knew what I was, more of _who_ I was. And the correlation with my name was incredibly comical.

_I am Christina Jay Shipht. A shapeshifter._

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_Okay, it looked longer on paper..._


	4. Cracked

_Thanks to SpaceHead3 for adding me to story alert. This is the last of the background, and then I'm throwing you all right in._

_Discl.: This. Is. Fanfiction. All I own are my OCs, Christie and Sam. Touch them at all, and you will die a slow, painful death, beginning with Chinese Water Torture. (that means you, Moffat.)  
_

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**Chapter Three: Cracked**

Then I met Samantha Cardinal.

In 2007, I was newly a freshman, starting my first year of high school. I had spent the past five years secretly researching my abilities, filling my head with computer articles and book excerpts and whatever folklore I could get my scrawny hands on. I experimented in the privacy of my small room, testing my range of forms.

I shapeshifted into animals. I had never felt the need to become another human and had never been daring enough to attempt inanimate objects. I discovered that if I concentrated hard enough, I could even become mythical creatures – the griffin being my favourite.

But my private world came to an abrupt standstill when Samantha Cardinal transferred in from Australia.

Samantha – Sam – was British. That was the first thing that drew my attention; I'd never encountered anyone from a different country, other than a handful of Asians and the immigrants that worked in fast-food restaurants and manicured landscaping. I'd seen many of the _James Bond_ movies, and her accent fascinated me. She was exotic, with her thermos of tea and red, high-top Converse. She was _different_.

It occurred to me after almost a week that she and her family did a lot of travelling; she seemed to bear the mark of different countries – England, Scotland, Australia, and somehow I guessed even France. It reminded me of my own unstable life. Only all my journeys took place within southern California, not even straying outside of Irvine and Orange County. Most recently, I'd been landed in a Teen's Home – I'd been out of foster care for about six months, as it had been decided that a Home would be more stable than a foster home, and stability was "most important" now that I was "leaving the realm of childhood" and entering high school.

Which was an excuse for how no one currently wanted to adopt an emotionless yet volatile, constantly hungry teen with "social inabilities." I hadn't cared. As long as I'd had a place to sleep and something to quell my hunger, I seriously hadn't cared.

All the same, I had found a fragile connection to the new girl. We were both different. We both moved a lot. Sam just had something I didn't: an uncaring, confident attitude. My only confidence rested in the notion that I was better off sheltering myself from the discrimination of the world – after all, there were so many examples of how people reacted to things that were different and to things that they didn't understand. Black people; Jews; the Witch Trials of Salemtown and the Witch Hunts of Europe – people had been executed simply for being different. But Sam was obviously of a contrary mind – and it worked for her. But she also wasn't a freak like me.

Sam seemed to carry herself around in some sort of invisible bubble, or maybe she could transmit subliminal messages to the common public, declaring, _This is who I am. Like it or shove off._ It had been utterly fascinating to me.

I had contented myself with watching her, without being too much like a stalker, for the first few weeks. We'd shared a math class, where she'd struggled with some of the concepts. I took Spanish and she took French. I took regular gym – where I discovered my adequacy as a runner – and she took dance.

We met officially one day in math. She had been struggling with our Algebra homework, rather than engaging in conversation like the majority of the class. Finally banishing my nerves and breaking every rule I'd established to isolate myself, I'd taken a seat in the empty desk beside her, glanced at her homework, and quietly instructed her how to finish her problem. She'd glanced at me, reached the answer, and looked up.

Then she'd introduced herself, asked me my name, and immediately struck up a conversation.

I had answered with mostly monosyllables at first, but soon she'd had voicing my opinion on the latest American music – in complete sentences, although my voice never grew louder. What seemed like seconds later, the bell rang and class was over; we had spent more than fifteen minutes discussing things from music to math to books. Before I had been able to absorb the gravity of what had happened, Sam was on her feet and smiling, saying goodbye and that she'd see me to tomorrow.

The rest of the school day passed in a blur, and that night I realised that I had spoken more in those few minutes than I had in the past two months, if not more.

I had also realised that I was eager to see her again.

Our companionship bloomed into friendship. The world had opened up as I had. Sam accepted me like no one else ever had, seeing me for my good qualities rather than for what was "wrong" with me. If I had nothing to say, she didn't push me to talk. If I was particularly stoic or even unresponsive, she didn't mind. She didn't assume. She didn't judge. She _liked_ me. I became attached to her -- the first real object of my affection in nearly a decade.

She invited me over once for dinner, one night during Christmas vacation, and even accommodated for my vegetarian diet. I was usually very reserved around her family – mom, dad, and little brother – but not as closed up as I would have been a single month prior.

But it took me a very long time to realise that my changes signified that I was healing – mainly because at the time, I was not of the mind that I was broken. Repressed and misunderstood, perhaps, but not broken. As our friendship deepened, my shields came down. I'd eventually reached a point where I trusted her with my life, and I'd wanted to tell her what I was and what I could do. I'd hoped to whatever god there was that she would accept all of me. But how would I have broached such a subject?

One afternoon, as we sat in her bedroom doing Algebra, I accidentally dislodged something from a stack on her desk. I'd asked her what it was and she told me with a huge grin. It was, of course, her sonic screwdriver.

Thus our math session had been interrupted as Sam wove a tale about someone called the Doctor, an alien that travelled through time and space in a TARDIS. The following week had then been devoted to Sam's math tutoring and my education on everything _Doctor Who_. I became quickly captivated and was soon well on my way to being what she called a Whovian.

Once I had been exposed to the Doctor's strange world, I then understood how Sam had been drawn to me as a friend: I must have had a mien of otherworldliness about me. She was obviously attracted to all things alien or extraterrestrial. I fell into that category more deeply than she knew.

But she was not unaware for very much longer after that.

We had been on the roof of my "home" on Saturday night, talking. Sam had begun practicing a dance routine when she came to close to the edge. One second she was dancing, the next she had disappeared over the ledge. Hesitating for no more than a heartbeat, I leapt up and dove over the side of building, arms spread-eagled in the open space. My body took but two single seconds to morph.

Sam had then become like prey to an eagle: clutched safely in talons the size of her head and carried high over the dark street with huge feathered wings. With the body of a giant bird, I'd plucked her from the night air, but half a storey from the ground. I had thrown away secrecy to save the life of my one and only friend, and no matter what we went through later in life, I would never regret it.

Her initial reaction was bewilderment. The next was excitement, then pure exuberance.

And that was that. My secret was safe. She'd cracked me open at last. I was her alien friend, and never happier.

That was a little less than a year ago.

* * *

_Enter the present._


End file.
